The neutrality of this article is disputed. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please do not remove this message until conditions to do so are met. (July 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
|
This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this articlebyadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
Find sources: "Appeal to tradition" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (June 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Appeal to tradition (also known as argumentum ad antiquitatemorargumentum ad antiquitam,[1] appeal to antiquity, or appeal to common practice) is a claim in which a thesis is deemed correct on the basis of correlation with past or present tradition. The appeal takes the form of "this is right because we've always done it this way", and is a logical fallacy.[2][3] The opposite of an appeal to tradition is an appeal to novelty, in which one claims that an idea is superior just because it is new.
An appeal to tradition essentially makes two assumptions that may not be necessarily true:
Appeal to tradition imports the value of not needing to reinvent ways to do things for which effective ways have already been established. But, "is fallacious when it confuses a long tradition of careful testing with the mere tendency to hold on to ideas because they are old".[2]
An appeal to tradition can be complicated by the possibility that different people arguing different views, each their own tradition to appeal to. For example, "Augustine's appeal to tradition against the Donatists is more complicated because the Donatists had appealed to tradition against the Catholics".[4]
This logic-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |